Eugenio Montejo (Caracas, 1938 - Valencia, 5 June 2008) was a Venezuelan poet and essay writer, founder of the literary magazine Azar and co-founder of Revista Poesía, a poetry magazine published by the University of Carabobo.In Venezuela he was
awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1998 and in 2004 he received the International Octavio Paz Prize for Poetry and Essay. International interest in Montejo’s poetry grew after his poem “La
tierra giró para acercarnos” (“The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer”) was
used in the film 21 grams by feted Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. A few lines from the poem are quoted by Sean Penn’s character in the movie.

Eugenio Montejo: A Note on Process

by Ted Mathys

Eugenio Montejo’s
poems possess a magical fluidity that breaks down distinctions between past and
present, interior and exterior, quotidian life and dream life, voice and
silence. That a rooster haunts so many of Montejo’s poems is no surprise. The
rooster’s voice announces the transition between night and day, a bleed of light
into darkness that upsets our most fundamental binaries. This indeterminate
moment of rooster song is what we are after in these translations. Like
Montejo, my mother speaks Spanish, but I do not. Montejo was a poet, and I am a
poet, but my mother is not. My mother and I share an American idiom, but
Montejo did not. In the swirling center of this Venn diagram these translations
attempt their own refracted “mother tongue.” I am skeptical of the performed possibility
for verisimilitude between source language and target language that governs much
translation. I wanted place an obstacle between Montejo’s originals and my own
tendency to get things right, but I wanted that obstacle to be human rather
than algorithmic. So instead of turning to Google Translate, over the course of
several months I sent my mother catalogued fragments of all ten poems in four
discrete batches. Each batch contained some language from each of the poems, out
of order and with all line breaks removed. Montejo’s diction and syntactical
arrangements can be extremely difficult, but she translated each fragment
without consulting a dictionary and without any contextualizing language at
hand. I then reassembled her raw English text into prose blocks and used them
as source material for these new poems. “The music of being is dissonant,”
Montejo writes, “but life continues and certain agreements prevail.” In the
end, our hope is that translation itself is one of those agreements.